Burger King’s New TV Ad Intentionally Triggers Google Home To Tell You More

What Happened
Google has yet to officially roll out ad products on Google Home, but that does not stop Burger King to hack the way the voice-activated smart speaker works to co-opt it into its latest marketing campaign. The fast food chain released a new TV spot that features someone in a Burger King uniform ceremonially uttering, “OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?” For any user with a Google Home near their TV, this will trigger Google Assistant to begin reading the Wikipedia entry for the Whopper. Google is reportedly not involved in the ad’s creation.

What Brands Need To Do
While this ad is a clever way to grab people’s attention, it is also exploiting the personal assistants to deliver an unwarranted marketing message via a personal home device. Some may find it goofy and write it off as a joke, while others would find it invasive and disruptive.

Ethics aside, this unusual ad highlights not only the increased presence of voice-activated devices at home, but also the weakness of the voice assistants not being able to differentiate the voices of the users. (Google is reportedly working on multi-user support for Home, which should help alleviate this issue.) It would be best for brands to stay clear of such gimmicks and take the growth of voice-activated smart devices seriously by developing branded audio experience to serve customers.

How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building Alexa Skills and chatbots to reach consumers on conversational interfaces. So much so that we’ve built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue. The “Miller Time” Alexa Skill we developed with Drizly for Miller Lite is a good example of how Dialogue can help brands build a conversational customer experience, supercharged by our stack of technology partners with best-in-class solutions and an insights engine that extracts business intelligence from conversational data.

If you’d like to learn more about how to effectively reach consumers on conversational interfaces, or to leverage the Lab’s expertise to take on related client opportunities within the IPG Mediabrands, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Barrett (samantha@ipglab.com) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

Source: The Verge